


Detention Duty

by andeemae



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Teacher Madge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-17 02:55:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28592847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andeemae/pseuds/andeemae
Summary: Disclaimer: I'm just playing with Suzanne Collins' characters and her world. They're hers. Not mineAN: Yet another story getting moved from ff. I know next to nothing about student teaching or NYC, if I got any details wrong, I'm so sorry.
Relationships: Gale Hawthorne/Madge Undersee
Comments: 4
Kudos: 57





	1. Detention Duty

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I'm just playing with Suzanne Collins' characters and her world. They're hers. Not mine
> 
> AN: Yet another story getting moved from ff. I know next to nothing about student teaching or NYC, if I got any details wrong, I'm so sorry.

Madge taps her purple pen against the stack of papers Mrs. Odair had given her to grade.

"You did the lesson," she'd told her with a smile. "Now, you get to see the fruits of your labor."

Or, as it was becoming apparent, the lack of fruits. So far it didn't seem like any of the students had soaked in so much as a single syllable of her lesson over the Civil War.

They were only a few weeks in though, so she hoped that meant her efforts would eventually have some kind of payoff. Preferably before she was done with her classroom work.

With a sigh she picks up the smudged paper and puts it in the stack of 'graded' work. Despite using purple, which she thought would make her grading look less like a massacre, it still looks pitiful. Like she's smeared grape jelly across her student's work.

While she's contemplating changing to a black pen, deciding if it'll look like she's literally beat up on her student's work, the door to the room creaks open.

Looking up, Madge is surprised to find Vick Hawthorne, from the second hour class, looking in at her. For several seconds he stares at her, then, a bright smile lights up his face.

"Hi Ms. Undersee," he says, pulling a wad of papers from his bag before tossing it into the desk closest to the door before walking up to the desk where Madge is setting.

Madge frowns. It's lunch, Vick should be out with his friends, eating from the school's newly approved, locally grown menu. They'd advertized some kind of fancy sounding chicken with Brussels sprouts in the weekly newsletter. Since it had sounded less than appealing, she's never been very good at eating her vegetables, Madge had brought her equally healthy peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a coke.

It was at least cheap.

"Why aren't you at lunch, Vick?" Madge asks, turning her papers over so he can't see the names on them.

"I needed to ask Mrs. Odair about my report." He thinks for a minute, his eyes focusing on Madge for a few seconds, then they light up. "Maybe you can help me out instead."

He's a good student, the least obnoxious of his class. Unfortunately, he wants constant feedback on his work and seems to think its Madge's job as the student teacher to help him. Sometimes to the exclusion of other students.

Vick lifts his hand, holds the smudged and crumpled papers out, looking a little sheepish. "Sorry. My brother messed them up."

With a tight little smile, Madge takes the papers from him, smoothes them out on the desk.

It's one of Mrs. Odair's, Annie's, little assignments requiring the kids to read a random book over an historical event and write a short report over it in the form of a movie review.

"I think it helps make all these dry readings a little more vivid for them," Annie had explained.

Vick had picked Pickett's Charge, which Madge thinks is kind of cheating. The event has been played out on the screen at least twice. He barely would've had to crack a book. Still, after reading through it, Madge is happy he at least understood the importance of the event.

"Well," she scans over the handwritten pages, mentally noting she needs to remind him to type it up. "It's a little dry."

He'd taken the paper outline to heart. A little too tightly. The review reads like bullet points.

Taking her purple pen, Madge adds a few notes here and there, corrects his punctuation and spelling, before pushing it back to him. "Here, see if this helps."

Vick takes the pages back, flips through them before looking at her and smiling. "Yeah, thanks."

He stays and stares at the papers for a few minutes longer before looking at Madge, who raises her eyebrows in a silent questions, 'anything else?' His color deepens and he starts to turn and head back to the door, but stops and looks at her, biting his lip.

Madge gives him a little smile and wishes he would go so she can finish her disappointing lunch and her equally disappointing grading.

Finally, he looks down at the papers then back at Madge. "So, you think if I fix this tonight and bring it back tomorrow you can look it over again?"

She isn't sure why he would want her to look it over again; Annie is hardly tough on her non-honor's classes. If he makes the changes Madge suggested he'll at least have an A minus.

"I would Vick, but I have to watch detention tomorrow." Mr. Latier had told her it would be character building. She isn't sure she believes that, but didn't get much say when they signed her up to monitor the lunch detention for the rest of her student-teacher class time at the school. "And you know detention rules."

No one is allowed in the detention room, Ms. Coin's cold, dark class and no one is allowed out. It's a silent, hopeless pit.

Which is just how the school wants it.

Vick nods, looking thoughtful. "Oh, okay." He finally turns and heads for the door, scooping up his backpack as he turns the handle on the door. "See you tomorrow, Mr. Undersee."

"'Bye, Vick."

Once the door clicks shut Madge flips the papers over before reaching into her bag and finding her sandwich. She digs around for a minute.

She forgot her coke again.

#

The next day, wrapped in an ugly sweater she had to borrow from Annie, a lumpy looking gray monstrosity with little dolphins on it, Madge sits at the front of Ms. Coin's frigid room and lazily watches the dozen students silently settling down and pulling out their homework. It's the only thing allowed during detention.

She pulls out the roster, scanning over the names, and feels her face fall into a frown.

Vick Hawthorne.

What had Vick, impossibly sweet and quiet Vick, done to get detention?

Just as she's about to take the roster out to the front office and ask how anyone could've made such a mistake, Vick, a little sweaty from a run from the other side of the school, comes ambling in. He gives Madge a smile and plops down in the front row, to Madge's right.

It's too late to ask him what happened, the last bell is about to ring, so Madge just sighs, shakes her head, and begins reading off the roll.

When lunch ends and all the kids get up and begin chattering away with all the built up energy of the hour, Madge walks over to Vick's desk.

"How'd you get detention?" She asks, crossing her arms and frowning at him.

He shrugs. "Unauthorized experiment during biology."

Madge wrinkles her nose and decides she doesn't want any further explanation. Some things are best left to the imagination.

She nods and goes back to the desk to gather her things and make a hasty retreat. Her blood is freezing in her veins, she's certain of it.

Once she's got her things together, she turns and finds Vick, still lingering by the door.

"So are you taking Mr. Latier's detention day?" He asks, shifting his backpack on his shoulder.

"Mr. Latier's day?" That sneaky jerk. Character building her backside. He'd dumped his day on her. She sighs. No changing it now. "Yeah, guess so."

For some reason that makes Vick's smile widen.

#

"Vick, honey, how did you get detention again?"

Gale frowns at his plate, stacked high with his mother's Wednesday night special: Meatloaf.

"Vick got detention?" He asks. That can't be right. She must've meant Rory.

"Yes," his mother gives Vick a sidelong look. "Fourth time this month."

When she heads back into the kitchen, to help Posy finish making the dessert, Rory snickers and mutters something at Vick. Whatever it is, Gale can't hear, but it makes Vick's ears go red and he punches Rory in the arm. "Shut up."

Gale glares at them. "Stop fighting."

He prods his meatloaf. It's cold and turning a sickly gray color. He'd had to stay late at the office and hadn't quite made dinner.

With a huff of annoyance at his job, Gale stabs his dinner and takes a bite, chewing it thoughtfully.

"Why are you getting detention all of a sudden?" He finally asks Vick.

Vick just shrugs, mumbling, "I dunno."

Rory snickers again. "Right."

Gale rolls his eyes. "If you have something to say, just say it, dumbass."

Picking up a dinner roll, Rory hurls it at Gale's head. "Just for that, I'm not telling you."

"You don't know anything anyways," Gale mutters, knowing it will goad Rory into telling him whatever tidbit he thinks he knows.

"I know the student teacher that got saddled with Mr. Latier's Thursday detention is like the surface of the sun," Rory smirks. "Hot and untouchable."

"All girls are untouchable to you," Gale grumbles. Rory makes a face.

After dodging another roll, Rory's aim is pitiful, Gale looks at Vick. He hadn't said anything in his defense, but Gale hopes he has a better reason for getting detention than to oogle some baby teacher.

Judging by the way his youngest brother is trying to become one with his chair and is several shades darker, though, Rory might just have it pegged.

"Vick…"

"It's not hurting anyone," Vick tells him, still slowly sinking in his chair.

"It's not helping you either," Gale tells him. "With your grades, coming from that school, you'll get into any college you want, but not if you keep acting like some juvenile delinquent."

Gale is in charge of footing the bill to that expensive-as-hell school with the kids' trust fund, and he isn't going to watch any of his siblings squander the opportunity their dad had given them. Gale had listened to his dad tell him about his life growing up poor, all the hardships he'd endured to make something of himself, and how he wanted better for all his children.

As the eldest after his father's death, Gale feels it's his duty to continue to keep his younger siblings from slipping back into the squalor their dad had worked so hard to pull himself out of.

"A few detentions isn't acting like a juvenile delinquent, Gale," Vick tells him.

"It certainly isn't going to look good on your permanent record." Even though Gale is ninety-nine percent sure that no such mythical record exists, it' what always sent him back to the straight and narrow.

Vick rolls his eyes. "A few missed lunches for petty things isn't going to send me to Sing Sing, Gale."

As Gale is about to tell him that while that might be true, a history of being a complete slacker isn't going to help him get into any of the medical schools he's always talking about, Vick grins.

"Besides, you haven't seen her." He sighs and his grin widens. "She's smart and funny and-"

"She's got an amazing rack," Rory adds with a smirk.

Vick's already dark coloring intensifies. "That wasn't what I was going to say."

"Uh-huh," Rory snickers, making a curvy gesture with his hands. "Vick's after her personality."

As much as Gale doubts Vick's crush is entirely based on this stupid baby teacher's brilliant mind and wit, his brother is less of a hormonal brat than Rory, so he supposes that might actually be what drew him to her in the first place. Gale runs his hand over his face.

"Just stop getting detention," he tells a visibly annoyed Vick.

"But-"

"No more," Gale warns sharply, using a forkful of meatloaf to jab at his youngest brother. "Get one more and I'm going up to that school and telling that girl she's got a lovesick puppy chasing her skirt."

Vick narrows his eyes. "You wouldn't."

Gale stuffs his meatloaf into his mouth and grins. He most definitely would.

#

For the next month, every Thursday Madge is in detention during lunch, and so, to her great surprise, is Vick.

"I forgot to turn in my homework during algebra."

"I talked during a test."

"I had three tardies."

"You don't want to know."

"You need to be more careful, Vick," Madge finally tells him on his fourth consecutive Thursday. "You're becoming a fixture in there."

Vick shrugs and reaches out, taking Madge's clunky book bag from her grip.

"My brother thinks I'm becoming a delinquent," Vick tells her.

Madge can't imagine why. Vick had gone from having a sterling record to a weekly spot in Ms. Coin's meat locker classroom during lunch.

He walks with her down the hall, handing her the heavy bag back when they reach Annie's room. "See you tomorrow."

Madge gives him a little nod goodbye and opens the door to Annie's room.

When the final bell rings and the kids, none of which had paid even the barest of attention to Madge's latest lesson, Annie begins packing up.

"I've got to get home early tonight," Annie tells her. "Finnick has a gallery showing and I want to look like a presentable member of society."

Which will take several hours. Not because Annie needs to put on a lot of makeup or do her hair, she's stunning with very little effort, but she has the most atrocious sense of direction Madge has ever encountered. Despite taking the same route home every day for the last ten years she still gets flustered when she has to switch trains. Madge honestly thinks it would be worth the extra money, and the expense of Finnick's Tylenol for the headaches he undoubtedly gets from having to rescue his wife, to just take a taxi.

"Do you want me to take the reports home and grade them?" Madge asks. It's a long weekend, the end of the first quarter, granting the kids and the teachers an extra day of sleep. Or in Madge's case, a lot of empty hours to fill.

"No. Those kids don't care if we get those reports back to them ever." She shoots Madge a smile. "Go have some fun. Go to a bar, get a date, enjoy your youth."

Madge pinches the bridge of her nose. "The only bars I can afford to go to don't have the kind of men you want to go on dates with, unless you want to end up on the late edition of the news, and in case it's escaped your notice, I've pretty much stopped enjoying everything. My youth included."

It probably has something to do with poor nutrition. Existing on a diet of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Ramen noodles, and pop tarts has undoubtedly zapped her ability to enjoy anything but the occasional carbonated beverage, which she's had to carefully pencil into her dwindling budget.

"I should introduce you to Finnick's bro-"

"No," Madge cuts her off. She's been set up enough in her life. It's too much pressure and she buckles under it.

"Suit yourself," Annie chirps, grabbing up her bag and heading out the door. She turns and gives Madge one last smile. "Don't touch those reports. We'll do them next week. Go have some fun. I mean it."

And with that she's gone, out the door and on her way to getting lost yet again.

Despite Annie's orders, Madge grabs the papers up and clips them together. She needs something to occupy her time for three days.

As she's about to take off Annie's ugly sweater, lock it up in the bottom drawer of her desk, the door creaks open.

"You just don't trust me, do you Annie?" Madge laughs, trying to kick her conspicuously full bag out of eyesight as she turns to the door.

It isn't Annie though.

At first, Madge thinks it's Vick. It certainly looks like him.

The man is too tall to be Vick though, has too much stubble on his face and, last she checked, Vick didn't wear suits. She's pretty sure that even if he did, he wouldn't be able to afford something as painfully, perfectly tailored as the man at the door's is.

After several seconds of staring, with her mouth hanging open no less, Madge finally snaps out of her stupor. "Can I help you?"

Why hadn't she taken off Annie's goofy dolphin sweater quicker? Why hadn't she fixed her hair? Why had she not worn lipstick?

Because she works with twelve year olds that barely recognize she's the same species as them, that's why. The likelihood that a man, a good looking, well dressed, non-parent man, would waltz into the school was, as Mr. Latier put it, a statistical impossibility.

The time-warped Vick stares at her for a minute, then smiles. "You must be Ms. Undersee."

Madge nods stupidly, hoping he isn't about to serve her with eviction papers. She's only a few days late with her rent.

He weaves between the desks until he's at the front row, his gray eyes running up and down her. His hand, tanned and strong looking, reaches out to her. "Gale Hawthorne."

With a rapid blink, Madge holds out her hand. "Vick's…?"

Please don't say father!

"Brother."

Oh thank god!

Madge crosses her arms, trying to hide the smiling dolphin on the left side of the sweater and gives him a smile. "How can I help you, Mr. Hawthorne?"

Vick's brother takes a few steps back and takes a seat on top of one of the little desks on the front row. He crosses his arms over his broad chest again, his eyes going up and down her body again. Madge tries not to make it obvious, but pulls the sweater closer around her. His leering is making her uncomfortable, no matter how handsome he is.

"You aren't what I expected," he finally says.

Nose wrinkling, Madge frowns at him. "Excuse me?"

#

Gale chuckles. "My brother told me you were funny and smart, he didn't mention pretty."

Though Rory had, in so few a words.

It isn't that Gale hadn't expected someone that wasn't at least marginally good-looking, Vick has had an eye for attractive girls for a few years now, but Gale hadn't expected quite what he walked in on.

He doesn't remember any of the teachers, or student teachers, looking quite like Vick's little crush when he'd been at the school. If there had been, Gale might've purposefully gotten detention too.

She's pretty, but not in an unreachable way. It would be hard to act superior and untouchable wearing an oversized grandma sweater with cartoon porpoises on it.

Ms. Undersee's cheek's flush, turn a soft pink that burns in the late afternoon light filtering in the classroom. She pushes a loose strand of hair behind her ear and fights off a smile.

"He, uh…oh," she finally says, her eyes still focused on Gale's feet.

Gale's smile widens. "I should've guessed though. You'd have to be a real stunner for a boy to work so hard to get detention with you."

Her smile, which had grown, shrinks back down her cheeks and she looks up, her eyebrows knitting together. "Get detention with me?"

With a sigh, Gale nods. "Yep. I warned him that if he did it again I'd have to come up here and tell you so you could put an end to it."

Ms. Undersee's shoulders slump under the lumpy sweater and she bites her lip. "I didn't-I'm so sorry. I had no idea he was doing that. I'm so sorry."

Her entire face is a vivid pink, the blush spreading down her chest, vanishing down the front of her frumpy blouse. Gale reaches out, lets his hand rest on her shoulder and she stiffens.

"Don't worry about it, alright? You have a hundred kids to keep an eye on. Vick was just one more brat vying for your attention."

She covers her face and takes a long breath. "I still feel so bad."

That wasn't his intention, but clearly she's attached to her students, even if the particular student he's seeing her about is probably having filthy daydreams about her.

"What do you want me to do?" She asks, dropping her hands to her sides and taking a deep breath. "I can ask Mr. Latier to give me a rotating schedule for detention or tell him what's going on and tell him I can't do detention at all or if you're really uncomfortable I can talk to my advisor and we can get me moved to another school…"

Clearly she's taking him very seriously. A little too seriously.

"I don't think you need to leave the school," Gale quickly tells her. That's a bit extreme for him. If she switches schools how will he find her?

She begins twisting her fingers into a painful looking knot and her eyebrows rise, as if to ask 'then what?'

Realizing his hand is still on her shoulder, Gale pulls it back, stuffs it in his pocket and gives her an appraising look. He's got to play this cool.

"Well, switching detention schedules is probably good enough." Gale pulls his hand out of his pocket and rubs his neck. "We can discuss it over dinner if you'd like. Come up with a really good plan. Maybe you can help me think of a good way to break it to Vick that you're seeing someone."

Ms. Undersee's frown deepens. "I'm not seeing anyone."

Perfect.

"Oh?" Gale lets his hand drop. "Then if dinner goes okay maybe we can meet up Friday for a movie. Talk about something other than my hormonal brother."

For a second she just stares at him, processing what he's said, then a small smile forms on her lips.

"Well played."

"Thanks."

She begins picking at a loose thread on the sleeve of her sweater and her eyes flicker up to him, peering at him through her bangs. "Guess I can't really say no to such a well executed pick up line."

Gale shrugs. "Well you could, but then you'd be breaking two guys from the same family's hearts, and you don't seem like the kind of girl to do that."

A laugh, bright and clear, fills the room and her eyes twinkle at him. "Break your heart? You just met me."

Taking much more relaxed stance as a sign he might be getting somewhere and needs to keep up the momentum, Gale points at her sweater.

"Well, I've seen 'The Little Mermaid' at least a hundred times, and it only took seeing Ariel once for Eric to fall for her."

Her eyes fall to the sweater and she sighs, looking back at Gale.

"You know, Disney's version isn't the original version?"

Crossing his arms, Gale gives her a thoughtful look. "Why don't you tell me about it over pizza?"

After contemplating it, bobbling her head back and forth in thought, she bites her lip and shrugs. "Okay."

Gale's smile widens. "Good. Now, do you want to tell me your first name, or should I guess?"

When her smile falls, she apparently hadn't realized he didn't have her name, Gale chuckles.

"Okay, Diana? Rachel? Maybe Mildred?"

It takes a second for her to catch his joke, but when she does a lazy grin finds its way onto her face.

"Madge," she tells him.

"Madge," he repeats. He likes it. "Are you ready?"

"Oh, wait just a minute," Madge tells him.

In the blink of an eye she sheds the sweater, tossing it into one of the bottom drawers of the desk and pulls the bag up and plops it into the swiveling chair beside her. With a slight frown, she pulls a bundle of papers, secured with a heavy clip, out and gives them a nod before dropping them back on the desk.

Gale reaches out and takes the still clunky looking bag from her hands, tosses it over his shoulder.

#

With a last glance at the room, Madge smiles and trails after Gale, taking a second to appreciate the cut of his suit.

If things work out she might need to send Mr. Latier a thank you note. Giving her his detention duty had been a sneaky jerk of a thing to do, and she certainly doesn't think it built any character in her, but it had at least gotten her a date.


	2. A Few Years Later...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I'm just playing with Suzanne Collins' characters and her world. They're hers. Not mine.

Madge wiggles into the couch and pulls Gale's sweater tighter around her. It's dark and thick, smells of Gale's fading cologne, and doesn't have a single aquatic mammal, real or fictional, stitched onto it. She loves it.

He's out picking up their dinner and he'll be back at the apartment soon so Madge picks up her purple pen and tries to focus on her grading. One look at her student's handwriting makes her wonder if maybe she shouldn't have a small lesson on penmanship to make her job a little less agonizing.

She has her own class now, her own students and her own lessons to plan out, has for a few years, but it's hard to focus on those things when dinner is on the way. Her stomach growls as if to remind her that she's not eaten since lunch, a disappointing meal of steamed vegetables and some kind of bland casserole from the school after she'd left her carefully prepared peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the counter at home.

"I offered to bring you something from the restaurant I was at," Gale reminded her when she got home.

Madge grumbled that she didn't need to be coddled. Though when he offered to go out and pick up dinner from her favorite Chinese restaurant while she caught up on her class work, Madge had jumped at the chance for some General Tso's chicken and vegetable fried rice.

Despite being comfortable and warm, snuggled on the couch as the rain came down in a lazy drizzle outside, Madge gets up and goes to the window, presses her forehead to the cool glass and peers down at the damp scene below. With a sigh, the glass fogs, obscuring the view of Central Park and all the cityscape around it.

She'd never expected to live in a place like this, like Gale's apartment. Madge's apartment had barely been an efficiency, a cramped single room with just enough room for her twin sized bed, dorm fridge, and a cabinet full of ramen noodles. The first time Gale had visited it he'd almost not been able to sit down with his legs out in front of him.

"It's…cozy," was about all he'd been able to come up with to describe it.

Considering his apartment could hold the entire story of Madge's apartment building with room to spare, it was a glowing compliment.

"You should come stay at my place," he'd always tell her after their dates. "I get a crick in my neck every time we stay at yours."

"It's not that bad," Madge had huffed.

He might not have exactly fit on her mattress, his feet dangled off the edge and Madge had to keep an extra set of blankets around during the winter to keep his feet warm, and the shower situation was best left not spoken of, but it wasn't the worst way to spend the night.

"I've gone on camping trips with my brothers and had more room to spread out," Gale told her one evening as they'd eaten leftovers on the fire escape. "And Rory's a kicker."

Still, if she wanted to stay at her apartment he stayed, and Madge was certain he enjoyed it in some ways.

"You like being able to reach the fridge without getting out of bed," she told him with a smirk as he used his foot to grab a beer from the mini-fridge.

He'd given her a grin. "I like not getting out of the bed at all."

Madge had tried to kick him off the side of the mattress after that.

The winters had been the best. Gale would show up in his long dark coat, snow clinging to his hair, with Madge's favorite caramel macchiato to walk her home from work. Then they'd stay in, order greasy food and watch Disney movies while trying to grade Madge's students' work. Cuddling and kissing was inevitable in such cramped quarters, and that was never a bad thing.

It had taken almost a year for him to convince her to move in with him. She'd gotten a job at the school after graduation and he'd pointed out that living with him would significantly cut her commute and keep her from having to take the subway.

"I can have a car for you every morning and it can come pick you up in the afternoon too," Gale had even told her as he tried to convince her.

"I don't need to be chauffeured around," she'd muttered, even though the idea of not having to take the subway was appealing.

In the end she'd had him go with her to buy a bike, though she still has him have a car take her to and from work when the weather is bad, rainy or windy or cold or too hot…

Sometimes she still misses her old apartment, but always coming home to Gale in his suits, or if she was lucky pajama pants, and the spectacular view of the city was a fair trade she supposed.

With another sigh, Madge walks over to the counter and deposits her stack of papers before flopping down on the barstool to try and focus. Just as she's about to attempt to finish adding up missed questions, the door opens and Gale appears carrying several plastic bags, the scent of dinner floating in with him.

"Finally!" Madge squeals as she dashes across the room to help him. She gives him a kiss and snatches one of the bags from him and quickly takes it to the counter, plopping it next to her papers.

Gale glances at the papers, apparently sees Madge hasn't made any progress since he left, and chuckles. "Are you going to give up and just do participation grades?"

Madge wrinkles her nose. "It's a test. So no."

He shrugs and begins pulling the food from the sacks, placing several containers out and pushing a couple towards Madge. "Do you want me to help you?"

"No," Madge sighs. "I'll do it. I just need sustenance."

Grabbing one of the white containers Gale had sat in front of her, Madge settles down onto the stool again and begins opening the top.

Instead of finding her dinner, though, she finds a crumbled napkin.

"Gale, they gave me a napkin!" She pouts, handing the empty container over the counter to him, her bottom lip jutting out.

With a skeptical look, Gale takes it and opens it a little more, pulling the napkin from inside and snorting. He continues to look down at whatever is at the bottom with a smirk as he walks around the counter.

He holds it out to her. "It's for you."

Madge leans back, if there's something scary in there she doesn't want to see it. Gale grins, giving the box a little jiggle. "Take a look."

"No," Madge shakes her head. He'll ruin her appetite.

His grin widening, Gale reaches into the box and fishes something out.

At first Madge isn't sure what it is, all she sees is a pale blue box tied up with a white bow gripped in Gale's tanned fingers. It isn't until he gives the ribbon a tug, begins taking the little top off the box that she realizes what it is.

He holds the now open blue box out to her and something glitters up at her.

It's a ring, a solid silver band with a sparkling diamond settled at the center. It's simple, but beautiful.

"I don't remember them putting those with the egg rolls last time," Madge says, eyes wide and focused on the ring.

"I paid a little extra," Gale tells her.

A little extra? Madge is fairly certain a ring from Tiffany's costs more than a small tip to the cook.

Carefully, he plucks the ring up and takes her hand, sliding the ring on her finger.

"I considered getting you a dinglehopper, but since we're eating Chinese it seemed a like a waste," he chuckles again. "Maybe my mom can make you a new sweater with a singing crab and yellow fish on it to make up for the oversight."

Madge's eyes are still wide as she takes her hand back and examines the ring, ignoring his jab at her goofy sweaters.

"Gale…"

He can't possibly mean what she thinks he means, but there are only so many reasons behind giving someone a ring.

Tears start flowing, rolling down her cheeks and dripping off her chin and onto her sweat pants.

"Is it that bad?" Gale asks, just an edge of concern in his voice as he takes her hand and examines the ring again.

Madge jumps up, throws her arms around his neck and tries not to rub her snotty nose on his well pressed shirt. His dry cleaner had a fit when Madge had smeared lipstick on the collar of the white shirt Gale had worn to an art gallery opening. At least he'd already taken off his jacket; those apparently are a little more costly to clean.

"I'm taking this as a yes," Gale chuckles into her hair, his hands pressing her to his chest. "Unless you're letting me down in a new and interesting way."

With a flurry of kisses, Madge begins laughing. "I love you."

Gale leans forward, presses Madge's back against the counter and slows the kissing down to an aching speed. Suddenly, he makes a snorting noise and catches Madge off guard.

"What?" Madge pulls back, nose wrinkled up in confusion.

Gale's eyes are squinted up in laughter. "I was thinking about Vick."

Madge rolls her eyes. "You are awful."

He begins kissing her again. "Don't worry. He helped pick out the ring. He'll be insufferable."

That makes her feel a little better. She'd felt badly when she and Gale had started dating and it was still apparent Vick had a crush on her. While she's certain he's past that, he's had several girlfriends since hitting his last growth spurt, she still feels a little like she used him even though it was all Gale, with his smooth talking and his painfully well cut suits, that had started their relationship.

In one smooth move Gale lifts her up and begins carrying her through the living area, past the wide window and the soggy view outside, towards the bedroom. Dinner and grading will just have to wait.


End file.
